This course will engage with and respond to some of the more pressing questions coming from within the disciplines of critical disability studies, feminist practice, and critical cultural studies. What is the relationship between disability, race, gender, ethnicity, and nation? What do critical disability studies have to offer feminist and other disciplines outside of the field? This course will look at some of the competing theories and assumptions related to disability and highlight the historic erasure of disabled lives across multiple political, academic, cultural, and mediated platforms. But, this erasure is only part of the story and as such, we will also look at interventions led by disabled activists that push against these historically oppressive tactics and strategies on local, national, and international stages.

How does representation work and who gets to decide how something or someone 'gets represented'? Transnational, postcolonial, critical race and cultural disability studies scholars make the case that a fuller exploration of race, class, gender, ethnicity, and embodied experience can help us understand how, through representational practices, systemic oppression operates across a multiplicity of institutional and material contexts.

This interactive course includes in-class workshop activities, canvas online interactions, and in-class discussions. As a starting point for locating how critical approaches in disability studies inform and complement one another, we will take a deeper look at some of the ongoing tensions between disability studies and feminist scholarship and enter into some of the more critical debates concerning representation, subjectivity, activist practice, visibility, inclusion, and embodied experience.